POCUS is Goal Directed

Narration

So POCUS is focused, limited and goal directed. It's basic. It can be used by physician, by mid-levels, by nurses, by EMS, etc. It’s very good at finding fluid. Here we see an image of a pleural effusion. We'll talk about these in later didactics, but there’s black – which is fluid over the diaphragm in this case, and you can see it with part of the collapsed lung waving around. Typically POCUS does not require advanced techniques – sometimes we'll go into those a little bit – but usually you just need a B or basic mode transducer and image. We’re looking for fluid – and other basic things in certain areas of the body. POCUS is an integrated examination, it's putting things together, sometimes from multiple areas – from the abdomen, the chest, the heart. We sometimes do POCUS for the eyeball, and for musculoskeletal areas.